Economics of Big Bands

Cafe Society
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Big band - Wikipedia

I’m curious as to how the economics of Big Bands worked. If you compare a band with 20 performers to one with 5, then ISTM that the pie is going to get split into much smaller pieces in the latter case. It’s hard to imagine that on average people will pay 4 times as much for 20 piece bands as they would for 5 piece bands. So what did that do to the salaries of these performers?

I’m wondering if perhaps the only real Big Bands were those of extremely successful acts and these could afford to divvy up the pie into so many pieces, unlike smaller bands which could and can survive as local or lesser acts. When reading the history of Big Bands it’s not so noticeable because the history tends to focus on big stars and famous people anyway, but it’s possible that there were far far fewer of such bands, and for this reason.

But maybe I’m missing something else.

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In a lot of cases, the band played for a percentage of the take, and would limit their appearances to larger venues.

Bands in that era also played schedules you wouldn’t believe today - multiple shows per night, no days off, etc.

I have a history of early radio that tells me Rudy Vallee and his band played nightly from 7:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Later on, different parts of Vallee’s performances were broadcast on three different radio stations, which couldn’t even happen today with contracts being more restrictive.

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I thought it was mostly the other way around. The band leader paid each musician a salary and with a few exceptions musicians were easily replaced cogs in the act; only the leader and sometimes the singers being irreplaceable. I’ve wondered about the same thing as the OP, but not about swing era big bands. It’s smaller (more democratic) gig groups like rock bands I wonder about. Do you really need that second guitar player if it’s going to cut the income of every member of that three piece combo by 33% (I probably did that math wrong - but you get the point,)

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I think this is exactly right.

Being in a band was an extremely low-paying job. Musicians lived the life because they loved playing music and probably didn’t or couldn’t work as anything else. Always has been. Think of The Beatles living four to a room over a brothel in Hamburg. The bandleader was responsible was travel expenses and a per diem for food. They were always torn between landing a gig as a house band and staying in one place or touring and getting more people to know them and buy their records.

Another way they made ends meet was starting out with small bands and increasing the number of members as they grew more famous. Count Basie performed with groups as small as a quartet before he hit it big. And IIRC Billie Holiday sang with them for a few months but left because of a $35/week offer,

Fortunately, there were bands everywhere in the 30s and 40s. They were standard entertainment at every nightclub, lounge, restaurant, dance hall, and radio music program. Employment for anyone minimally talented or reliable was pretty steady, at least enough to cover the costs of reefers,

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One of the “nostalgia” magazines had a short article about a high school class that tried to hire a known “big band” for their graduation dance. When they told the band owner of their budget, he responded that he could send a piccolo player.

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Nothing incompatible between my observation that Big Bands played larger venues and Elmer J. Fudd’s that band members got paid a pittance. I was trying to say that - even if the band members were only played a dollar per night - the band itself would more likely play a ballroom or some other large venue that could cover the overhead, instead of a small supper club or night club.

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Not directly relevant, but a while back I was talking to a buddy who plays bass for a touring 4-piece bluegrass band. I observed that they would really sound great w/ a fiddle. He agreed, but said, “The band seats 4, it is easy to share 2 double hotel rooms, and the checks split better 4 ways than 5!” :slight_smile:

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I don’t know. I might enjoy living over a brothel.

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Also in the heyday of big bands, live music was the only music. No DJs.

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A bit of nitpicking. In the very early days of radio, playing phonograph records was often used to fill time. Getting live music to sound right was extremely difficult, since radio stations didn’t have either the rooms or the microphones to handle numerous musicians.

As radio grew and networks formed, sound engineers found ways to create music rooms and stations had more money to spend on hiring bands. Even so, local stations often used recordings for blocks of time or in between sports or news or other unpredictably-timed shows.

Programs that consisted of an announcer playing recordings and talking in between records date back to the mid-1930s, the heyday of big bands.

From Wikipedia:

In 1935, while listeners to New York’s WNEW in New York (now information outlet WBBR) were awaiting developments in the Lindbergh kidnapping, [Martin] Block built his audience by playing records between the Lindbergh news bulletins. This led to his Make Believe Ballroom, which began on February 3, 1935 with Block borrowing both the concept and the title from West Coast disc jockey Al Jarvis, creating the illusion that he was broadcasting from a ballroom with the nation’s top dance bands performing live. He bought some records from a local music shop for the program as the radio station had none. Block purchased five Clyde McCoy records, selecting his “Sugar Blues” for the radio show’s initial theme song.

Because Block was told by the station’s sales staff that nobody would sponsor a radio show playing music, he had to find himself a sponsor. Block lined up a producer of reducing pills called “Retardo”. Within a week of sponsoring the program, the company had over 3,000 responses to the ads on Block’s radio show.

Block’s style of announcing was considerably different than the usual manner of delivery at the time. Instead of speaking in a voice loud enough to be heard in a theater, Block spoke in a normal voice, as if he was having a one-on-one conversation with a listener.

Block’s version of Make Believe Ballroom was a huge hit that lasted for years and even spawned a movie with that title. It was syndicated nationally in 1940, but most big cities had a similar program on a local station.

It’s certainly true that a dj-style music show was just one of many types of programs on any station; devoting the whole day to them wouldn’t come until after WWII. But pretty much every regular radio listener would have understood the concept at any time in radio history.

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Perhaps @CookingWithGas is talking about live DJs, which have an interesting history dating back to France during WWII. American blues and jazz musicians were thin on the ground during the Nazi occupation, so the discotheque with a DJ playing records for the audience to dance to was invented. Since the music was deemed unsuitable by the occupiers, the clubs were usually underground and secret which meant they were often meeting places for the French Resistance. Remarkably, even after liberation, DJs and discos stuck around and were exported to the rest of Western Europe in the 1950s and then to the US in the 1960s.

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I meant a DJ rolling into a club and playing dance music for 100 people.

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Funnily enough, even this other meaning of DJ can be nitpicked.

Jukeboxes, under various names, were a thing during the big band days. Not every place where people gathered and danced could afford live music, so smaller venues used jukeboxes to generate the music. Swing music especially was a favorite.